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To cope with his dread, John Kitzhaber opened his leather-bound journal and began to write.
It was a little past 9 on the morning of Nov. 22, 2011. Gary Haugen had dropped his appeals. A Marion County judge had signed the murderer's death warrant, leaving Kitzhaber, a former emergency room doctor, to decide Haugen's fate. The 49-year-old would soon die by lethal injection if the governor didn't intervene.
Kitzhaber was exhausted, having been unable to sleep the night before, but he needed to call the families of Haugen's victims.
"I know my decision will delay the closure they need and deserve," he wrote.
The son of University of Oregon English professors, Kitzhaber began writing each day in his journal in the early 1970s. The practice helped him organize his thoughts and, on that particular morning, gather his courage.
Kitzhaber first dialed the widow of David Polin, an inmate Haugen beat and stabbed to death in 2003 while already serving a life sentence fo…

New Mexico used the death penalty sparingly during the period when it was last legal, handing down about a dozen death sentences and executing one inmate between 1979 and 2009, when lawmakers and Gov. Bill Richardson abolished it. Analyzing the costs of capital punishment, legislative staffers in 2009 wrote, "New Mexico does not receive much return on its death penalty investment."

The report said fewer than 1/4 of all capital prosecutions in the state led to a prisoner on death row. Fewer than 1/2 of the cases led to a death sentence, and 68 % of those were overturned on appeal.

Death penalty cases require heightened standards for defense attorneys, the report said, with at least 2 lawyers at each stage of the proceedings, trial-level litigation and mandatory appeals. Jury selection is particularly long and arduous in such cases, the report added, costing at least 4 times as much as other 1st-degree murder cases.

The only person executed in New Mexico between 1979 and 2009 was Terry D. Clark, who was put to death in 2001 for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old Roswell girl in 1986. The state brought in 2 "execution experts" from the Texas prison system for Clark's execution, the 1st in New Mexico since 1960.

"There is only a 4.5 % chance that any multi-million dollar death penalty prosecution will ever end in an execution in New Mexico," the legislative report said.

It's also unclear whether the state could navigate the logistical hurdles to carrying out an execution.

The state's prison system does not have a supply of the drugs typically used to carry out lethal injections, according to Alex Sanchez, deputy secretary for administrative support at the Corrections Department.

Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said finding the necessary drugs now could be complicated, with major pharmaceutical companies and many pharmacies refusing to sell their products for use in executions.

"That narrows who you can get the drugs from. The fear has been that executions are likely to be even more unsafe and even more prone to being botched if the drugs are obtained from compounding pharmacies," Dunham said, referring to the drug-manufacturing companies that have become the last resort for states in short supply of pharmaceuticals required for executions.

2 men sentenced to death in New Mexico prior to 2009 are still on death row.

Timothy Allen was sentenced to death in 1995 for kidnapping, attempting to rape and then killing a 17-year-old Flora Vista girl.

Robert Fry was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of Betty Lee, a 36-year-old Shiprock woman. He also is serving life sentences for the 1996 killings of Farmington residents Joseph Fleming, 25, and Matthew Trecker, 18, as well as the 1998 murder of 41-year-old Donald Tsosie of Ganado, Ariz.

Fry and Allen are incarcerated in the same tightly controlled conditions designated for inmates sentenced to life without the possibility of parole - a sentence that replaced the death penalty when it was abolished. No one is currently serving such a sentence in a New Mexico prison.

"Capital punishment is clearly a very expensive process."

Sanchez said the New Mexico Corrections Department would be capable of carrying out an execution and that reinstating the death penalty would change little for the state's prison system. "There would be no difference in housing, no difference in treatment," she said. "It would just be a matter of carrying out the execution."

But the cases of Fry and Allen illustrate the long process of carrying out a death sentence. Lawyers representing the men went before the New Mexico Supreme Court as recently as 2014, asking the state's highest judicial body stop their executions in light of the death penalty's abolition.

Their cases are still pending, and the Law Office of the Public Defender recently asked the state Supreme Court to authorize additional funding to pay the men's lawyers.

"Capital punishment is clearly a very expensive process. It adds costs for law enforcement, for prosecution, for the courts, and it adds tremendous costs to provide effective assistance of counsel," said Chief Public Defender Bennett Baur.

Death penalty cases require specialized skills, he said.

Baur also noted that state agencies are facing budget cuts. Public defenders, as well as prosecutors and others in the criminal justice system, would be forced to do more with less if capital punishment were reinstated, he said.

"In the time of flat budgets - or worse - there are things you cannot do," he said. "There are cases that cannot be prosecuted and cases that cannot be defended."

The political prospects of reinstating the death penalty remain unclear and are likely to shift with the outcome of the Nov. 8 general election.

The New Mexican contacted several state lawmakers to ask if they would sponsor legislation to restore capital punishment. Only 1, Republican Rep. Andy Nunez of Hatch, responded.

Nunez, who represents the district in Southern New Mexico where a police officer was gunned down last week, said Thursday he will sponsor a bill to reinstate the death penalty if Martinez asks him.

"I agree with her," Nunez said. "My wife's not for it, but I am."

Martinez did not specify Wednesday how broadly she believes the death penalty should be applied. But her comments signaled she is interested in at least allowing capital punishment for the murders of children and law enforcement officers. She mentioned slain Hatch Police Department Officer Jose Chavez in her remarks.

Nunez said such a scope is appropriate. While he supported repealing the death penalty in 2009, Nunez said Thursday he feels he was "misled."

He thought the death penalty would be replaced with a sentence of life without parole, he said, but with no one receiving such a sentence, he suggested that inmates who might have qualified for the death penalty when it was legal might now be receiving sentences allowing their eventual release.

Asked if the state can afford to undertake executions and the accompanying lengthy court battles, Nunez said: "They can afford that better than setting them in prison."

Source: Santa Fe New Mexican, August 19, 2016

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Organizers of an anti-death penalty coalition say they have delivered over 56,000 petition signatures to New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, urging him to sign a bill to repeal the state’s capital punishment law.
Sununu has vowed to veto the bill, saying he stands with crime victims and members of the law enforcement community.
Before presenting the signatures, the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty held a news conference Thursday where family members of murder victims spoke in favor of repealing the death penalty.
The bill was passed by the House and Senate.
It is unclear whether they have a two-thirds majority of votes in both chambers, which is needed to override vetoes. Source: The Associated Press, May 17, 2018

⚑ | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.

The high school junior accused of gunning down 10 students and teachers at a Santa Fe school is facing a capital murder charge - but he’ll never face the death penalty, even in Texas.
Though Dimitrios Pagourtzis was charged as an adult and jailed without bond, even if he’s found guilty he can’t be sentenced to death because of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. And in the Lone Star State, he can’t be sentenced to life without parole as the result of a 2013 law that banned the practice for minors.
“In Texas, after the Supreme Court’s decision, they passed a law that basically says that it’s a life sentence if you’re under 18 at the time of the crime,” said attorney Amanda Marzullo, executive director of Texas Defender Services. “The Court has said that it is cruel and unusual to execute an individual who is under 18 at the time of the offense.”
The Santa Fe High School student admitted to the mass shooting that killed 10 and wounded 10 others early Friday, according to court documents.…

31 years ago, on May 20, 1987, just before midnight, I was sitting in the witness area of the Mississippi Gas Chamber watching someone die in front of me. His name was Edward Earl Johnson.
I am both sad and glad that Edward’s final two weeks, right up to his agonising death, were recorded in Paul Hamann’s extraordinary BBC documentary Fourteen Days in May. Sad, because from time to time I find myself forced to relive that horror, when I watch the film at some public event; glad, because at least Edward’s senseless death has had positive repercussions – the film inspiring many to take up the battle for people in his precarious predicament.
Yet it irks me beyond measure that people who should know better use their position of power to prognosticate that the justice system never executes the innocent. For example, in a case called Kansas v. March, in 2006, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia loudly proclaimed that there is not “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a…

How much does the public have a right to know about how the state of Indiana executes people?
It is a question that, effectively, strikes at the heart of capital punishment. And it's the issue in a 4-year-old case in Marion Circuit Court that started with a public records request by Washington attorney A. Katherine Toomey to the Indiana Department of Corrections (DOC).
"If we win ... the Indiana public will know more about one of the most consequential areas of decision making that the state of Indiana engages in," attorney Peter Racher said in an interview.
The state, however, sees it as contrary to a state law limiting what the public can see pertaining to executions. The law was controversial because of how it passed. After midnight on the final day of the 2017 legislative session, it was added to a budget bill, two pages out of 175.
"The budget is now a death penalty bill," Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, said at the time. "There's been no public…

The lawyers fighting the death penalty ordered for a former Northmont High School student want the Ohio Supreme Court to reconsider its affirmation of the sentence and scheduling of the execution.
Austin Myers' lawyers said in a motion filed this morning that they want the state's highest court to overturn the conviction and call a new trial "or in the alternative that his sentence be modified to life without parole."
Myers, 23, is still apparently the 2nd youngest on Ohio's death row 3 1/2 years after being sentenced for the murder of childhood friend Justin Back, 18, of Wayne Twp., Warren County.
Last Thursday, the court affirmed the death penalty for Myers, for the stabbing death of Back at his home outside Waynesville in January 2014.
The execution was scheduled for July 20, 2022 in the decision.
Warren County prosecutor David Fornshell was pleased with the 7-0 ruling by the state's highest court.
"The 7-0 decision is always something you like to se…

Defendant claims firefighters didn't try hard enough to extinguish blaze
The nanny responsible for killing 4 members of a family in an arson appeared in court in eastern China on Thursday to appeal her death sentence.
Mo Huanjing, nanny of the family of Lin Shengbin, pleaded guilty to starting the fire. But she said during the appeal at Zhejiang High People's Court that "the penalty in the original ruling was extremely heavy".
"The tragedy wasn't the result I wanted to see," she added. She said the efforts of firefighters were flawed. And she confessed to her offense during the initial interrogation, which could be regarded as a reason to earn a more lenient sentence.
Wu Pengbin, her lawyer, told China Daily that some firefighters and employees of the property management department of Lin's apartment attended the hearing as witnesses at his urging.
"I wanted them to show what they were doing at the time to the court, as I, with my client, thoug…

(CNN) - An Australian woman has been sentenced to death by hanging after a Malaysian court overturned an earlier acquittal of drug smuggling charges.
According to CNN affiliate Sky News, a three-judge panel unanimously threw out the previous ruling in 54-year-old Maria Elvira Pinto Exposto's case.
The grandmother and mother of four was arrested in December 2014 while transiting through the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur on a flight from Shanghai to Melbourne, according to another CNN affiliate, SBS News.
She was found in possession of 1.1 kilos (2.4 lb) of crystal methamphetamine and faced a mandatory death penalty under Malaysia's draconian drugs laws.
Exposto claimed she had no knowledge of the drugs in her bag and had been scammed by a boyfriend she met online.
According to SBS, Exposto's lawyers said she had gone to Shanghai to file documents in relation to her boyfriend's retirement from service in the US army. When she left China, Exposto claimed she was handed …

To cope with his dread, John Kitzhaber opened his leather-bound journal and began to write.
It was a little past 9 on the morning of Nov. 22, 2011. Gary Haugen had dropped his appeals. A Marion County judge had signed the murderer's death warrant, leaving Kitzhaber, a former emergency room doctor, to decide Haugen's fate. The 49-year-old would soon die by lethal injection if the governor didn't intervene.
Kitzhaber was exhausted, having been unable to sleep the night before, but he needed to call the families of Haugen's victims.
"I know my decision will delay the closure they need and deserve," he wrote.
The son of University of Oregon English professors, Kitzhaber began writing each day in his journal in the early 1970s. The practice helped him organize his thoughts and, on that particular morning, gather his courage.
Kitzhaber first dialed the widow of David Polin, an inmate Haugen beat and stabbed to death in 2003 while already serving a life sentence fo…

Concerns about Texas' dwindling lethal injection supplies coupled with questions about the age of the drugs have some advocates wondering whether the state is prepared to humanely carry out its recent uptick in scheduled executions.
Texas currently has 8 death dates and 9 doses of its execution drug - compounded sodium pentobarbital - for use in the Huntsville death chamber. What's more, a string of contradictory records from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice raises questions about whether some of those doses could be 3 years old, far older than previously reported and old enough that experts worry it could increase the chances of a "torturous" execution.
"The older the drug the greater the likelihood of a botched execution. Period," said Maurie Levin, a death penalty lawyer with experience in lethal injection litigation. "It becomes contaminated, corrupted, impotent, and all of those things can lead to a torturous execution."
In response …

Texas executed Juan Castillo, who said he was innocent, for 2003 San Antonio murder
A Texas death row inmate was executed Wednesday — his 4th execution date in a year. Though advocates and his attorneys insisted on Juan Castillo's innocence, he lost all his fights in court and was put to death for a 2003 San Antonio murder.
Juan Castillo was put to death Wednesday evening, ending his death sentence on his 4th execution date within the year.
The 37-year-old was executed for the 2003 robbery and murder of Tommy Garcia Jr. in San Antonio.
The execution had been postponed three times since last May, including a rescheduling because of Hurricane Harvey.
Castillo's advocates and attorneys had insisted on his innocence in Garcia’s murder, pleading unsuccessfully for a last-minute 30-day stay of execution from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott after all of his appeals were rejected in the courts.
The Texas Defender Service, a capital defense group who had recently picked up Castillo’s cas…

DPN opposes the death penalty in all cases, unconditionally, regardless of the method chosen to kill the condemned prisoner. The death penalty is inherently cruel and degrading, an archaic punishment that is incompatible with human dignity. To end the death penalty is to abandon a destructive diversionary and divisive public policy that is not consistent with widely held values. The death penalty not only runs the risk of irrevocable error, it is also costly to the public purse as well as in social and psychological terms.The death penalty has not been proved to have a special deterrent effect. It tends to be applied in a discriminatory way on grounds of race and class. It denies the possibility of reconciliation and rehabilitation. It prolongs the suffering of the murder victim's family and extends that suffering to the loved ones of the condemned prisoner. It diverts resources that could be better used to work against violent crime and assist those affected by it. Death Penalty News is a privately owned, non-profit organization. It is based in Paris, France.Your donations to Death Penalty News DO make a difference.